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Chapter 20
🕑 Added 2024-06-07 03:00:03 +0000 UTC
Mitchell broke the kiss and stepped back from Lethelin feeling dizzy. As he blinked the water from his eyes and looked down at her, she was just coming out of the trance of their first kiss. Her grass-green eyes met his, droplets of mist clinging to each eyelash. Neither said anything for a moment.
“Why did you do that?” Lethelin asked, sounding a little winded.
“It felt like the right thing to do,” Mitchell said.
If he had stopped to think about it beforehand, he probably wouldn’t have done it. Mitchell didn’t even know if people kissed on this world. He might have been committing a huge cultural taboo. She could have taken offense and stuck her wickedly pointed knife in his gut. But she hadn’t. She’d leaned into the kiss and returned it with just as much fervor.
Lethelin licked her lips, collecting more moisture from the wellspring on her tongue. She studied him for a moment, then stood up on her toes and pulled him down in the same motion, reinitiating the kiss. There was more heat this time and they wrapped their arms around each other as people came and went through the lush park with no one paying them any mind. Public displays of affection were apparently no problem.
Mitchell felt himself swelling and Lethelin felt it too. As their lips came apart she giggled, eyed him with a devious twinkle in her eye, and pushed her hips into his.
“I hope you're better with your spear than you are with your sword,” she said as she leaned in and nipped at his neck.
“I’m going to need a minute before we separate, I think,” Mitchell said, feeling his face heat up even with the cool mist of the wellspring soaking him through.
Lethelin gave a throaty laugh as her hands slid down his back and she grabbed two handfuls of his ass.
“Walk close behind me to the fence,” she told him with a wicked grin.
She pulled away from him and he did his best to rearrange himself so his erection wasn’t obvious and stuck close to her. Luckily, no one seemed to notice.
A few moments later they were at the fence and Mitchell had a chance to see the wellspring in all its glory. The ground just on the other side of the fence sloped sharply down a good ten meters or so into a glimmering crystal blue lake that encircled the wellspring. It didn’t look that deep but Mitchell had an idea that his eyes were playing tricks on him. It looked like he could wade across it all the way to the spire but the cerulean depths suggested it was some sort of optical illusion brought on the by the purity of the water.
As he scanned around the huge circumference of the lake, he saw screws that had been sunk into the water and which were pulling it up into large elevated tanks which had pipes running off at different angles. Some of those tanks had other screws connected to them which brought the liquid up even higher. The highest ones connected to aqueducts.
“Those are Archimedes screws!” Mitchell exclaimed. First aqueducts and now the screws.
Lethelin glanced up at him, water trickling down her face, and said “You’re doing the thing again where you say words that make no sense.”
“It’s a thing that was invented over 2,000 years ago on my world,” he shouted to be heard over the roar of water crashing down from the spire.
“Well, here we just call them water screws. Not archi… archadema whatever.”
Apples. Aquaducts. Archimedes screws. Humans on another world. There were too many coincidences. If he was to be a king on this world, he was determined to figure out its connection to his own.
Marveling at the awesome sight before him, Mitchell noticed something else interesting. There were people hanging down at points all around the perimeter of the lake. He saw them working away at the mineral deposits with small hammers and pick axes. He asked Lethelin about it.
“They’re collecting the mineral build-up for use in various alchemical recipes. It’s quite useful and it helps maintain the area. There are crews who work daily cleaning up deposits all over the city. The stuff they scrape off the ground and the buildings isn’t as useful as the pure deposits from the lake, but it still has to be done. Otherwise, the whole inner city would be coated in the stuff.”
Lethelin, grinning, glanced down at his crotch to see if he’d returned to a more appropriate state and, finding him presentable, said they should push on to the bathhouse.
“It’s not far. And we definitely need to get you shaved. Your beard is scratchy.”
Mitchell reached up and rubbed his hand over his jaw and chin. He’d never grown a beard before. There was one semester in college when he got a little too into the old Seattle grunge thing and had grown a goatee, but once he saw it wasn’t doing him any favors with the girls, he’d shaved it off. A razor hadn’t touched his face since he’d arrived, however. He was suddenly glad he didn’t have a mirror.
Lethelin laced her fingers between his and they veered off to the left and found a path leading out of the park. They passed several other people enjoying the water as they had, and he saw a lot of couples having water-logged picnics. He also noticed more than a few groups of people that were clearly romantically involved–men with multiple women, women with multiple men, and mixed groups of both genders. Race didn’t seem to matter much either. Humans with elves, elves with orcs, a handful of dwarves, and a couple of other species he hadn’t learned the names of yet.
As they emerged from the last line of trees, Mitchell asked Lethelin about the apparent polyamory that was going on.
“So you can have more than one partner here?”
Lethelin gave him a curious look.
“If you want. Why wouldn’t you? Do they not where you’re from?”
“I mean, some people do, but it’s still a bit of a cultural taboo. Most people who have multiple partners don’t advertise it.”
Lethelin scoffed.
“Is your whole world made up of Haliks?”
“What do you mean?”
“One of the more fish-brained things they believe is that multiple partners weakens the soul. They call it ‘sharing the light’. If you lay with too many people, your soul’s light is diminished and you are less able to receive Stollar’s blessings.”
“Oh,” Mitchell said.
“You’re only supposed to share your light with one person and that person will be bonded with you in the afterlife for all eternity. So they say.”
“Our culture has somewhat similar beliefs, yeah. A lot of it has to do with religion.”
Mitchell decided that he hadn’t misheard the orc baker earlier when he’d said wives. He must really have had more than one.
“Here people can do what they want,” Lethelin continued. “If you only want one partner, you just have one. That’s what my mother and father had. She had offers, as I said. But she always said my father was her heart’s twin and he was all she ever wanted. She never rebonded after he died.”
Her face took on a wistful appearance as she remembered her parents but before Mitchell could ask for more details, she snapped out of her reverie and looked around.
“Anyway, we’re here!”
They had emerged from between a couple of beautiful four-story buildings into a plaza. More of the large trees circled another fountain but this one had a large statue at the center, much more impressive than a lot of the other smaller sculptures crowning so many of the public fountains they’d passed as they walked to the spire. This one depicted a four-meter tall voluptuous nude woman carved of midnight black stone with veins of gold running all through it.
Water appeared to be flowing down in a thick stream from the pitcher into a nearly still pool about a meter across surrounded by a wide variety of multicolored flowers that, once again, Mitchell had no name for.
“That’s Denass,” Lethelin informed him as she saw him staring at the statue.
She was exquisite in every detail. Denass was bent forward holding a water pitcher made of polished gold that gleamed like a small sun in the bright light of morning. Her face was serene and ageless. The smile was loving and welcoming, as if she knew all of your faults, every dark secret and misdeed, but she loved you anyway. Her body was the definition of statuesque. It looked as if, at any moment, she would stop pouring the water and start moving, and he could have sworn he saw strands of the figure’s hair blowing in the breeze but when he gave those flowing black tresses a solid look they were as immobile as…well, stone.
The stream pouring out of the golden pitcher appeared unmoving and for a moment Mitchell thought it was some sort of perfectly clear crystal, but as he got closer he saw that there was the barest ripple in the pool as the liquid made contact. But as it flowed out of the pitcher it didn’t even shimmer.
Mitchell stood for several heartbeats just staring in awe at the representation of one of this world’s gods. He wanted to crawl up on the pedestal and touch it but he didn’t see anyone else up there so he figured that would be a bad move. His eyes told him that if he touched it, rather than finding cool stone he would find warm flesh and he was aching to see if he was right.
“Yeah, we get it, she’s beautiful. Come on, loverboy!” Lethelin snickered, glancing at his crotch again as she dragged him away. “And don’t worry. You’re not the first one to react to her that way. Myself, I think she enjoys the attention.”
“She looks so real,” was all he could say as she pulled him to the other side of the fountain and stopped in front of a large circular building.
The exterior of the bathhouse was made of a cream-colored marble stone that had similar veins of gold running through it as the statue. The large entryway was flanked on either side by two statues of women carved in the same black stone as the statue of Denass dressed in gossamer white robes with their hands reaching skyward in a gesture of supplication. Above them water flowed from the mouths of two faces carved into the marble, one male and one female, between the women’s hands and onto their heads before cascading down their bodies.
The building itself was three stories tall and faced with windows that ran the entire circumference from what Mitchell could see. Carved all along the surface were scenes that Mitchell assumed were from this world’s past, or from folk tales. It reminded him a lot of the kind of things he would see on cathedrals back home.
Lethelin informed him that the upper floors were for the really rich people. The bulk of the bathhouse was underground and extended at least five levels as far as she knew. Possibly more.
“Can we afford this?” Mitchell asked, as she led him up the wide staircase towards two large brass doors where two very muscular humans, one white and one black, stood in loincloths. As they approached, the men moved in sync and pulled the doors open on silent hinges.
“Yep! Come on, let’s get you cleaned up. I bet you’re a pretty slick fish once you’ve properly bathed.”
